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After 23 years of living abroad, Tadiwos Belete left Boston five years ago to return to his native Ethiopia. He hoped to cash in on what he sees as an untapped market here: one-stop, full-service beauty salons and day spas. The venture might seem risky considering that most Ethiopians earn less than $2 a day, nearly a sixth of its population teeters on the edge of hunger, and the country is consistently ranked among the world's poorest. But Belete and others see promise in this Horn of Africa nation, which is experiencing a boom of sorts, with its economy for the past two years expanding faster than China's. ''I'm not here doing charity work. I'm a businessman," Belete, 40, said recently, his voice rising above the hectic sparkle of his hair salon as he straightened a woman's black locks between his fingers to snip off the ends. ''Ethiopia is growing, and I want to be part of its development." The road to wealth rarely leads back to Africa. But even as millions of Africans line up at foreign embassies for visas to the West, another trend is developing: Thousands of Africans and those with African roots in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean are returning each year to their ancestral homeland. Not since the early 1960s, as one African nation after another gained its independence from European nations, has there been such a fervent interest among expatriate Africans in returning home. Government officials in Ghana and Ethiopia, apparently the two countries most attractive to returnees, have estimated the number of returning Africans to be in the thousands. Business leaders in Ghana and Ethiopia have launched their own ''back to Africa" campaigns to retrieve the more successful among their diaspora and attract black urban professionals from the United States and Europe. [more]